Driving through walls of flame

By the BBC’s James Cook, Paradise in California

Paradise is hell. A smouldering, sepia world in ruins. The air is acrid. Burning chemicals leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

Walking among the ashes of people’s lives is eerie and awful. There is a profound sadness here. We pass a child’s charred swing, a swimming pool filled with filth, and worst of all, a pet dog which did not survive.

Such was the intensity of the blaze that much of the debris is hard to recognise. Wafers of ash are drifting down like enormous snowflakes, smothering sound.

But it is not quite silent here. A sooty squirrel scrambles up a blackened tree in a panic. There are booms and creaks from burning trees and telegraph poles.

And soon, going from ruin to ruin, there will be the sound of those with the hardest job of all, checking to see if anyone was left behind.

Fire officials have also issued evacuation notices for parts of Chico, a town of 93,000 people north of Sacramento.